In the News (Thu 24 May 18)

The concept of virtualparticles necessarily arises in the perturbation theory of quantum field theory where interactions between real particles are described in terms of exchanges of virtualparticles.

As such, virtualparticles are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are "temporary" in the sense that they appear in calculations, but never as indexes to the scattering matrix (i.e., they never appear as the observable inputs and outputs of the physical process being modeled).

In the later case, it is sometimes said that virtualparticles cause the effect, or that the effect occurs because of the existence of virtualparticles.

en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Virtual_particle (1617 words)

Virtual particle -(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)

In physics, a virtualparticle is a loosely defined term that is frequently used to explain or illuminate a variety of disparate effects in quantum field theory.

As such, virtualparticles are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are "temporary" in the sense that they appear in calculations, but never as indexes to the scattering matrix.

The IVBs are particles of interaction only - they are metric catalysts, mediators, or "brokers" which allow and facilitate transformations and decays within and between the "families" of elementary particles, the quarks and leptons, which are respectively the constituents of the nucleus and the electron shell of atomic matter.

The energy to produce these virtualparticles must be borrowed from the vacuum surrounding their point of manifestation, and this energy must be paid back to the vacuum before its loss is "noticed" by the "police" - the conservation laws - particularly the conservation of energy.

The large mass of the W IVB is interpreted as a measure of the extreme proximity required by the transfer mechanism (the greater the proximity, the higher the energy required to force the partners together, and hence the greater the necessary mass of the IVB).

[Virtualparticle pairs] are predicted to have a calculable effect upon the energy levels of atoms.

The forces and particles that appear are more-or-less random, governed only by symmetry principles (like the conservation principles of energy and momentum) that are also not the product of design but exactly what one has in the absence of design.

We just happen to be in the one where the forces and particles lent themselves to the generation of carbon and other atoms with the complexity necessary to evolve living and thinking organisms.

Particles can be destabilized by such subliminal thoughts as "I am a bad person, and deserve punishment." Core issues like this can lead to thought patterns which de-stabilize systems in the body and lead to a diversity of diseases ranging from those described as psychosomatic to those which pronounce a death-sentence, such as cancer.

Thus the vacuum is viewed as a seething inferno of virtualparticle fluxes, and the concept of an ether is again accepted as referring to this "virtual plasma" or "virtual flux" vacuum -- which is a far different ether than the old material ether that was theorized prior to relativity.

Many other sorts of virtualparticles are emitted and absorbed and born and extinguished, in addition to photons, by various observableparticles in free space.

The maximum range of an exchange force is dictated by the uncertainty principle since the particles involved are created and exist only in the exchange process - they are called "virtual"particles.

If a force involves the exchange of a particle, that particle has to "get back home before it is missed" in the sense that it must fit within the constraints of the uncertainty principle.

A particle which can exist only within the constraints of the uncertainty principle is called a "virtualparticle", and the time in the expression above represents the maximum lifetime of the virtual exchange particle.

II Building a virtualparticle with vertex constraints Equations defining the virtualparticle The motion of a charged particle in an arbitrarily oriented, fixed magnetic field was described in Appendix II in ref. [1].

III Building virtualparticles when a subset of particles is verticized Building virtualparticles is more complicated than discussed above because we want the flexibility of merging different kinds of particles, some of which have poor or no position information and so cannot be easily used in a vertex constraint.

Particles which are forced to pass through the vertex determined by the first class, but which are not used to find the vertex.

Now, consider a virtualphoton that comes from the particle on the right and is absorbed by the particle on the left.

This is because of the propagation of virtual quanta of the F field, represented by the diagonal lines.

The notion of virtualparticles mediating static forces comes from perturbation theory, and if there is one thing we know about quantum gravity, it's that the usual way of doing perturbation theory doesn't work.

An IVB "metric particle", mediator, or catalyst functions by engulfing a particle ripe for transformation (referred to below as the "parent" particle), and combining it with one or more suitable particle-antiparticle pairs, these latter drawn from the infinitely varied resources of the virtualparticle "sea", the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum.

Because the real and virtualparticles of today were once all part of the same primordial high energy "sea", it appears that the IVBs are simply reconnecting the manifest and unmanifest parts of the original "sea" by reconstituting the dense metric in which both were born.

Hence although the virtualparticle x antiparticle complex is identical in both the "short" and "long" decay sequences, the products are different because the "short" annihilates one member of its virtual complex, whereas the "long" does not.

In the description of the interaction between elementary particles in quantum field theory, a virtualparticle is a temporary elementary particle, used to describe an intermediate stage in the interac...

Virtualparticles always come in pairs, a particle and antiparticle, which can be of any kind.

In quantum field theory the number of particless in an area of space is not a well-defined quantity, but like other quantum observables is represented by a probability distribution.

It's hard even for particle physicists to see this using the Feynmandiagram rules of QED, because they're usually formulated in a mannerdesigned to answer a completely different question: that of theprobability of particles in plane-wave states scattering off of eachother at various angles.

Here, though, we want to understand whatnudges a couple of particles that are just sitting around somedistance apart--to explain the experiment you may have done in highschool, in which charged balls of aluminum foil repel each other whenhanging from strings.

Now, consider a virtualphoton that comes from the particle on theright and is absorbed by the particle on the left.

johnoleary.net /cones/virtual_particles.html (3224 words)

Learn more about Virtual particle in the online encyclopedia.(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)

Learn more about Virtualparticle in the online encyclopedia.

Virtualparticles are always created as a pair of particle-antiparticle, and mutually annihilate in short order.

The idea here is to decrease the number of virtualparticles with which photons interact, and that naturally means that the rate of interaction must also decrease, on a per-unit-of-distance basis.

virtualparticles are not the ones to be concerned with...

Thus, with no virtualparticles in a vacuum, there is nothing to stop the particle-like properties of a photon from being sufficient for it to cross the vacuum.

www.halfbakery.com /lr/idea/Faster_20Than_20Light (7879 words)

Particles, Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)

Any particle with mass m is constrained to move on the upper branch of this hyperbola.

In the quark model, there are only 12 elementary particles, which appear in three "generations." The first generation consists of the up quark, the down quark, the electron, and the electron neutrino.

The Standard Model of particlephysics also predicts the existence of a "Higgs boson," which has to do with breaking a symmetry involving these forces, and which is responsible for the masses of all the other particles.

There are rather severe limitations to this approach, but it's a worthy attempt to share some of the results of the enterprise that is particlephysics with the general public and students.

This is the real thing: the Particle Data Group maintains and organizes the storehouse of data accumulated by the world's particlephysics labs in the past few decades.

Particlephysics experiments are hard to do in a classroom, but you can show your students the real tracks of cosmic rays or particles from nuclear decays in the diffusion cloud chambers sold by Supersaturated Environments.

Because of the nature of the virtualparticle flux comprising it, the potential is a collection of individual virtual energies - a collection of the individual energies of a host of individually moving virtualparticles.

Each particle is still almost totally separate from each other, most of the time.

A vector potential is any dynamic (nonstationary) ordering in the virtualparticle flux of vacuum.

jnaudin.free.fr /html/scalwfaq.htm (3172 words)

A New Interpretation of Mass and Gravitational Field - Wu - Journal of Theoretics(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)

This kind of current is formed by the directional motion of a virtualparticle which is characterized by

The similarity between Gravitation Law of Universal and Coulomb’s Law indicates that it seems the mass enacts as the same character in the generation course of gravity as the charge in that of Coulombian force.

However, in this paper, we propose that the mass is a kind of current formed by the directional motion of a kind of virtualparticle.

In Session 2, we introduced the particle model of matter by looking at examples of the behavior of matter on a macroscopic level that were best explained by assuming matter was made of particles.

In these “VirtualParticle Labs,” you will manipulate a realistic scientific model of matter as particles in order to build your understandings about how interactions and changes on a microscopic scale relate to the macroscopic scale.

The Virtual Lab: Several parameters are changed to experiment with the model.